EAT LEAD, SCUM

REVIEWED - THE PUNISHER: The latest Marvel Comics adaptation to reach our screens is, in its attitude to crime and punishment, just about the most terrifyingly right-wing film we have seen since Michael Winner was last allowed behind a camera.

If stringing-them-up is, as my rare visits to golf club bars suggest, the only language hooligans understand, then hooligans will have no problem understanding The Punisher.

Tom Jane, a near-Anglophone Christopher Lambert, plays an FBI agent who makes powerful enemies while carrying out one last case before he hangs up his gun, settles down on the porch, gets ready to smell the roses, etc. At the conclusion of the drugs bust Jane is, at this stage, still prepared to allow criminals to live to catch sight of a judge. He regretfully watches as one of the hoodlums is mown down in the first of the film's many hails of bullets.

It transpires that the slain man was the son of pipe-smoking crime kingpin John Travolta, who, with scant regard for L. Ron Hubbard's views on toleration and acceptance, proceeds to murder Jane's entire family and, it would appear, everybody he has ever met, briefly glanced at or heard tell of. Jane puts on a black T-shirt and grabs a gun.

It is refreshing (can that really be the word?) to come across a film that is so comfortable in its sadism and so enthusiastic in its keenness to find new ways to eviscerate actors you don't quite recognise. Indeed, though it is not the shortest movie of its type ever made, The Punisher is never dull. It is, however, just a little too sinister to recommend with any real enthusiasm.